It’s not just the war…

I’m one among a growing cadre of anti-war activists, trying to bring a stop to the madness of the United States government (not my government) in Iraq and Afghanistan (and other places not seen on the nightly TeeVee news).

Yet even if the US were to withdraw all its troops from these countries, with a Limey under each arm. If the killing were to stop tomorrow and all the soldiers put to useful work back here at home, even then the insanity would not stop.

Its not just war that’s the problem, it’s the entire society based on the idea that “we are right, and they are wrong.” And since “we are right,” we can justify taking their resources for our use because “they are wrong.” Not just wrong like Saddam Hussein, but wrong in that they are not us and they have resources that we need, and we are civilized and cultured and free and democratic and they don’t deserve the resources they’re sitting on because they’re not putting them to civilized and cultured and free and democratic uses like we would do if we had them. And if any of them object or try to stop us and protect their land and resources, we trivialize their claims and demonize them and pretend they’re not human and we kill them and the wives and their children and their grandparents and we make their land unfit to live in and we take what we want and leave the people and the land bleeding and dying.

So it has gone for hundreds of years. The United States is merely the latest and best at the game of colonialism that started centuries ago when ruffians in towns decided that the water and the fuel and the animals and the plants outside the town should belong to those who live in the town, not to those uncouth ruffians who live outside of the town and don’t fully utilize the largesse that surrounds them. So the people of the town went out unto the people outside the town and killed them and took their animals and their plants and their minerals and their water and hid them away in the town for their own uses and profit.

Fortunately, Peak Oil looms on the horizon, larger than the United States government, more powerful than all the bombers in the world, able to bring fleets of warships to quiescence in the middle of the sea.

It will take time. Mother nature commands glaciers and vast continent-wide ice sheets, hurricanes and monsoons, tornados, drought and plague.